Matinees On Main Street: A Movie History Podcast

So why did New York City become the first home of the movies? This episode will explain why that happened.

The arrival of the Edison and Lumiere projectors in New York vaudeville houses proves to be and introduction of these movie machines into America. Investors start buying and promoting Edison films, while itinerant mechanics attempt to build their own projectors. Through this mishmash of mechanical creativity, the American public gets it first taste of movies.

Once William Kennedy Laurie Dickson left the Edison Company, he joined friends who had been developing a desktop viewing machine known as the Mutoscope, and the foursome organized a company known as American Mutoscope and Biograph, a company that attempted to avoid confrontations with the Edison Group, but at the came time directly challenged them in a number of ways.

The very first stars in the projector era were two young ladies whose film shorts proved to be quite popular: May Irwin and Cissy Fitzgerald.

Louis and Auguste Lumiere are ready to sell their cinematographe worldwide. Lumiere cameramen and salesmen take the machine to the various cities of the world and promote the idea of moving images to places that never saw them before, including Russia, China, Japan, India, South America, Mexico and Australia.

With projectors being introduced to Americans in vaudeville houses, the Edison Company brings out it's own projector, known as the Vitascope. This was the machine based on the projector devised by Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins.

For several years, the primary place to watch movies was in vaudeville houses. This episode give you a brief history of live public entertainment in America in the 1800s and how it led to vaudeville. Vaudeville's sudden rise, it popularity, its exhibition scheduling, and it moral influence all had an effect on the movies at its birth.

Through the efforts of the Lumiere brothers and London scientific instrument maker Robert Paul, projectors start to appear in London.

Merry Christmas. A few days after the Christmas of 1895, the Lumieres showed a series of film shorts in a small basement salon in downtown Paris. A number of people who had seen Lumiere films at private showings attended this post Christmas exhibition, as well as others. around thirty or so people attended this first showing, but the size of the crowds were grow a lot as the Lumieres continued to...

The star performer of the first movie clip to be wildly popular was Annabelle Moore Whitford, a dancer who became popular in Chicago at the time of the city's Columbian Exposition and World's Fair. Her dances, known as the Butterfly Dance, and the Serpentine Dance, were influenced by another Chicagoan, Loie Fuller, who turned skirt dancing into an artform, and launched the Modern Dance movement. T...

While Edison continues to market a peephole machine, in France, the Lumieres develop a projector of their own.

Thomas Armat and Charles Jenkins, two men from the Washington DC area, develop America's first movie projector.  This machine will be very important in film history, as its the first projection machine that Thomas Edison would market, but it is the damaged relationship between the two men that makes this an intriguing story.  

William Laurie Dickson worked with Thomas Edison to build the kinetoscope.  Unfortunately resentment, as well as pressure from others to help build machines for them is putting him in a very difficult position.  What's he going to do?

Episode 14 looks at some of the stars of the first kinetoscope films.  These people were  primarily vaudeville stars, including those who had become friends of Edison developer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson.  These people include the bodybuilder Samson, Little Miss Sure Shot, Annie Oakie, and the Spanish dancer Carmencita.  

Two groups of men, one of them being Greek Americans, and the other being the investment group of Maguire and Baucus, both introduce the kinetoscope to Europe.  There, they will inspire Robert Paul and Birt Acres in London, the Lumiere brothers in France, and possibly Max Skladanowsky in Berlin.  

Otway and Gray Latham join with a few friends to convince the Edison Company to make a boxing film.  The film will be show in their kinetoscope parlor set up in lower Manhattan, and would prove to be a success, at least for a time.  This would be the first of a number of successes for the movies and boxing as they ally with each other for the mutual success of both.  This episode includes a brief...

The Edison Company starts to sell kinetoscopes through a outside distribution group formed by the Holland Brothers of Toronto, Ontario, and Norman Raff and Frank Gammon.  The foursome establish a kinetoscope parlor on Broadway in the old theater district and are surprised by their immediate success.  

Thomas Edison's lab is readying the kinetoscope for the world to watch.  But before it's ready, test films have to be made, as well as films that will become available to customers once the kinetoscopes are available.  On this episode, we'll take a look at the Edison lab's readying process, the bugs they have to work out, and these first Edison films, including DICKSON GREETING and FRED OTT'S SNEE...

Thomas Edison, with a lot of help from his assistant manager, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, starts to explore the idea of making pictures that move.  He'll investigate the idea of linking the moving images to sound by designing a machine that will work with a phonograph, before finally making a peephole machine that shows moving pictures but doesn't have any sound.  

This is an episode dedicated to some of those people not considered when discussing the the line of influence that leads to the movies.  Some of them were just too early to count.  Some of them, like Ottomar Anschultz and Auguste Le Prince, should be at least considered.  In all five cases, more efforts should be made to research the lives and potential influence of these men.  

This is how one idea, the idea of moving images traveled from Eadweard Muybridge to both Etienne Jules Marey, who would develop a moving picture camera,  and Thomas Edison, who would pursue Muybridge's idea of creating a machine to produce both moving images and sound at once.  Edison would then discover the machine that could capture those images, when he visited Marey in Paris.  These  are the m...

George Eastman, and frustrated amateur photographer looks for a way to simplify the photographic process and ends up developing a camera film that would finally allow the first inventors of movie making machines to progress in their ideas.  

We follow the trials and tribulations of Eadweard Muybridge and Gov. Leland Stanford after their first horse photograph sessions in Sacramento.  Muybridge faces a murder trial and Stanford leaves Sacramento for San Francisco, and the two men eventually spend two years shooting pictures of racehorses at Stanford's horse farm at Palo Alto.  

In this episode, we follow young Thomas Edison as he develops his interest in telegraphy, and uses it to develop his career in inventing communications systems.  We see how telegraphy eventually leads to the telephone, how the early telephone led to Edison's experiment with the phonograph, and how all of this effects the way he views his investigations into moving images.  

After failing the test for his Doctor's license, Etienne Jules Marey decides to start studying the motion of animals instead.  While doing so, he develops a camera that can take multiple pictures on a glass slide, at a fast rate.